Woman Used Identities of Dead People to Defraud U.S., Officials Say

A Chicago woman was sentenced to just over five years in prison after fraudulently obtaining the identities of dozens of dead people, from infants to adults, and using the information to steal more than $45,000 of government funds, according to prosecutors and court records.

The woman, Katrina Pierce, acquired more than 36 death certificates for murder victims in Illinois — ranging from 2 to 22 years old — from 2019 to 2021 by pretending to be related to them, according to court records. She then used personal details, such as dates of birth and Social Security numbers, gleaned from the documents to file for tax refunds and pandemic stimulus payments.

Sometimes she used her name, once claiming on a federal income tax return that a 7-year-old boy who died in 2015 of a gunshot wound was her son. Other times, Ms. Pierce, 51, relied on aliases to pose as relatives of dead people to claim their tax refunds, according to court documents.

Brian Havey, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois, said in a sentencing memorandum last month that Ms. Pierce’s identity theft scheme was “not only illegal but morally repugnant.”

“It is a disturbing history of stealing and assuming false identities and aliases, including those of the dead, both children and adult victims,” Mr. Havey said.

Prosecutors charged her with multiple counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. She pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft, according to court documents.

At Ms. Pierce’s sentencing on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Virginia M. Kendall took note of Ms. Pierce’s history of committing fraud, The Chicago Tribune reported.

“There have been so many opportunities for you to turn away from a life of crime, and you’ve been unable to do so,” Judge Kendall said.

Ms. Pierce accumulated 11 convictions for theft and fraud across several states between 1996 and 2012, according to court documents. She was convicted five times alone in North Carolina for obtaining property by false pretenses and public assistance fraud, court records show.

She had spent a “substantial portion of her adulthood” behind bars, Mr. Havey wrote in his sentencing memorandum.

Her lawyer, Seema Ahmad, emphasized that Ms. Pierce had “a painful childhood of abuse and neglect growing up in Chicago’s projects” and said that her case involved “tragedy at every turn.” Still, she added that Ms. Pierce’s conduct was “deeply disturbing.”

Last month, Mr. Havey recommended a six-year prison sentence, court documents show. He cited Ms. Pierce’s last fraud conviction in 2012. She received an 11-year sentence and was released in 2019. That wasn’t enough to deter Ms. Pierce, whom he described as an “incorrigible criminal.”

“Defendant Katrina Pierce is a lifelong thief and fraudster, stealing other people’s identities and swindling government programs since at least the 1990s,” he wrote.

She was under supervised release from her last conviction, and this latest case, her fourth federal fraud conviction, was also the third time she had committed a new crime while under supervised release, officials said.

Ms. Pierce did not focus only on murder victims in Chicago. During a search of her home just before her arrest, Internal Revenue Service agents seized nearly three dozen death certificates from California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and North Carolina, according to court documents.

Her scheme was “sophisticated, thought-out and extensive in scope,” Mr. Havey said in his sentencing memorandum, adding that Ms. Pierce had employed at least 25 different aliases.

Ms. Ahmad said that Ms. Pierce is in jail, awaiting a federal prison designation. She will also have to pay about $30,000 in restitution, Ms. Ahmad said.